Christopher Nolan was on the phone before Ryan Coogler ever committed to shooting Sinners in IMAX — and the call, by Nolan’s own account, was less about technical advice than about permission.
“He was sort of looking for someone to tell him it wasn’t crazy to shoot his vampire film that way,” Nolan told the New York Times. “I was like, no, I’d love to see that.”
Nolan, a two-time Oscar winner and the format’s most prominent champion, recalled first introducing Coogler to IMAX with a screening of Dunkirk, describing his habit of showing fellow filmmakers the potential of the large-format medium. That early exposure planted a seed. Coogler has said his personal relationship with IMAX dates back further still — to opening night of The Dark Knight in 2008, a screening that left a mark no other film in the format had matched.
When Sinners entered pre-production, Coogler consulted Nolan and his producing partner Emma Thomas on both the IMAX cameras and the System 65 package used alongside them — the first time a film had combined Ultra Panavision and full-frame IMAX photography. Nolan’s central piece of advice: treat the IMAX camera like a Super 8. Don’t bow down to it. Make the film the way you’d make any other film.
The instinct paid off on a scale that exceeded most projections. Sinners became the highest-grossing original film domestically in 15 years upon its April 2025 release, and went on to receive 16 Academy Award nominations — the most ever earned by a single film, breaking the record previously shared by All About Eve, Titanic, and La La Land. At the 98th Academy Awards, it converted four of those nominations into wins, with Autumn Durald Arkapaw becoming the first woman in history to win Best Cinematography and Ryan Coogler taking home the award for Original Screenplay.
Nolan’s remarks arrive weeks before his own The Odyssey opens on July 17 — the first narrative feature ever shot entirely on 70mm IMAX cameras. His comments carry the tone of someone surveying a movement rather than a single collaboration. “One of the great satisfactions of my career has been being part of an evolutionary process of a filmmaking system,” he said, adding that his excitement lies in seeing what other filmmakers might do with the format after him.
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A record 15 films were shot at least partly with IMAX technology in 2025, with 14 more expected in 2026. For an industry watching domestic box office revenues stagnate well below pre-pandemic highs, the format’s momentum offers one of the cleaner success stories in recent years — and Sinners, built on a phone call and a Nolan screening room, sits at the center of it.
